


Still In My Pilgrimage

by tigerbright



Category: C S Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet series
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Christianity, Gen, Internal Monologue, Introspection, World War I, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbright/pseuds/tigerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dear Dreamflower, I hope you like this!  In my personal canon, the events of <i>That Hideous Strength</i> take place around 1950, during the beginnings of the Cold War, which Lewis predicted frighteningly well.  This is the story of how Grace Ironwood came to be Ransom's personal physician.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still In My Pilgrimage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dreamflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamflower/gifts).



"'I've no particular reason to suppose I shall come back wounded. But just in case--if you can find a doctor whom we can let into the secret, it might be just as well to bring him with you when you come down to let me out.'

"'Would Humphrey do?'

"'The very man.'"

\-- from _Perelandra_ by C.S. Lewis__

"'No, my dear,' said Mrs. Dimble. '...It doesn't _really_ matter leaving the old house. Do you know, the pleasure of living there was in a way a melancholy pleasure...All those big upper rooms which we thought we were going to have lots of children, and then we never had...'"

"...Grace Ironwood looked up with a set expression on her face which had grown rather pale. 'Do you wish -- ?' she began. The Director laid his hand on her arm. 'No,' he said. 'No. There is no need for all these stories [of joining the Company] to be told [now].'"

\-- from _That Hideous Strength_ by C.S. Lewis

\--

Grace Ironwood was a strong woman. Everyone said so. She had been a nurse in the Great War and had so impressed her superior, Dr. Humphrey, that he had recommended her for a medical degree. An idealist, she had resolutely refused to specialise, aside from some psychology coursework that seemed useful, wanting to be a small town G.P.

None of that had prepared her for what was before her.

\--

Dr. Ironwood gently stroked the brow of her patient, a nine-year-old much-beloved child gasping for air. Ronald's lungs had filled with liquid again and again, no matter how many times she drained them, no matter what treatment she tried. Even penicillin, which had brought so many of her patients with pneumonia back from the brink of death, was of no use, for no antibiotic could combat influenza. She did not know it, but her patient also had a bacterial infection that would later be called Hib, resistant to penicillin and preventable by vaccine.

This child was going to die, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She looked up at the parents and spread her hands helplessly, hating herself for being caught in a cliche. "I can't... do anything more."

Cecil Dimble simply nodded, red-eyed, shoulders drooping. "I'll see you out." As they walked to the door, they heard Margery move to sit by Ronald's bed. "Sleep, my love," she murmured. "It will all be better when you wake up."

"You'll be here, Mummy?"

"I'll always be with you, precious."

Grace dared not turn her head, afraid of what she would see.

"I'm sorry," she managed. "I should have been able..."

"God has us all in His hand," Dr. Dimble told her steadily. "We will grieve, and He will comfort us."

Grace only nodded. Her own faith had crumbled long ago, at the hands of her reverend father and pious mother. She would not, could not, tell the Dimbles that the comfort they looked for did not exist.

Back at her surgery, she locked her door to patients and sat in the dispensary, gazing accusingly at the instruments and medicines that had failed her. Finally, she reached for the telephone and requested an Oxford number from the operator.

"Dr. Humphrey? You said that I should call you if ever..." Her voice broke, and she forced herself to continue. "If ever I should be unable to accept the loss of a patient." The gentle voice on the other end told her that he would be coming to Edgestow early in the morning.

\--

When Grace opened the door, John Humphrey saw red eyes and rumpled hair and clothes. "Dr. Ironwood," he said gently, "you need sleep."

She laughed bitterly. "It's a little late for 'Physician, heal thyself,' isn't it?"

John took her elbow and steered her inside. Her limp passiveness alarmed him. "I'll make a cup of tea, shall I? Kitchen this way?" She let him put her into a kitchen chair. He filled the spotless kettle and put it on the gleaming Aga. "How do you keep this place so clean? I know you're rushed off your feet with patients, being one of the few doctors outside College."

Her face remained expressionless, but she nodded. "I have a girl from town to help me, Ivy Brown. She's a bright girl; I wish I could get her some education. But she and that boyfriend of hers are planning to marry, and he's always getting in trouble..." Her voice trailed off.

He sat down across the table from her. "I don't remember you caring this much about the soldiers."

She laughed bitterly. "I cared about every single one. But I didn't know them, the way I know my patients."

"I'm sorry, that was stupid of me."

"Yes."

They listened to the clock tick until the kettle whistled.

"I'll get some cups." Humphrey began looking into the cabinets.

"I delivered Ronald, did you know?"

"I thought you probably had, given how long you've been here."

"Margery had two miscarriages before him. And terrible bleeding when he was born. I told her she really shouldn't have any more, but she had two more pregnancies. Nearly died on the fourth miscarriage, and I insisted on surgery to prevent more... with a love like that, you don't tell them to stop having marital relations." Her mouth twisted. "I thought I'd had a love like that, once."

"Dick was horrible to you. And to everyone."

"Yes. I was a fool."

"No more than any of us."

\--

A child's funeral is awkward and crowded, and Ronald's was no exception. The next-door neighbor who had scolded Ronald over taking windfall apples sobbed over the coffin and was pulled away by her daughter, whispering, "They know you didn't really wish him dead, Mum."

Margery and Cecil thanked each person for coming, standing by the door of the chapel to greet each person entering. Grace could not meet their eyes, but Margery pulled her into a hug. "You did what you could," she whispered. "God had his reasons." Grace could not soften into the hug, and went to hide in the back of the small college chapel.

Fifteen minutes later, as a layperson read from the Book of Lamentations, she was doubly glad she had done so, as she heard the words, "But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men." She quietly got up from the end of the pew and went quietly out the double doors into the quad. She drew a deep breath of the crisp fall air, and lectured herself.

"DOCTOR Grace Ironwood, it is the fall of 1940 and you are forty-two years old. You could not save your friends' son. But you can save other sons." Her heels clacked over the bricks of the quad as she strode to the campus recruiting office.

\--

The Second World War was no easier than the first. More young boys to stitch together, more mud, more lice, even as far behind the lines as she was. Poland was cold and icy; she often feared her patients would freeze before they would heal. She repaired vital organs and demanded transfusions from healthy soldiers. On one occasion, a boy in the ward tent, with stitches in his aorta and missing half his liver smiled at her. "Dr. Ironwood," he said shyly, "you made it so's I could write a letter home. If I get home too, that'll be due to you and all."

"Not to me," Grace said. "To you. I'm amazed you're still with us."

He sighed. "It's terrible strange to be here, when my mates all around me died. But now, there's Jones, who just got grazed, and Upjohn's got a scar for life and gets to go home. God'll have his reasons for who lives and who dies."

Another boy, an American, turned to hear this. "We say that at the High Holidays," he said softly. "On the High Holidays, God writes in His book, who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water..." His voice broke. "And the Germans are killing people like me in concentration camps, every day."

The other boy blinked. "I'd thought that were a myth, then? Something made up so we'd hate the Germans even more?"

The Jewish boy's eyes filled. "I met a member of the Polish Resistance," he whispered. "He showed me a report from a man named Jacob Grojanowski, who escaped from Chelmno. That's the same report that was just published in London; you saw it in the newspaper this morning. It's true."

The other boy reached out awkwardly. "I'm sorry, Goldman."

"How can God let this happen, Dr. Ironwood?"

Grace shook her head. The British boy clutched the small cross around his neck and began to cry. Goldman turned his head away to stare at the ceiling.

\--

Grace sat outside, wondering how the sun could shine on such a day, how she could feel warmth. It was July of 1942, and she did not believe that the world would ever be free of war, ever.

\--

A few months later, after the breakdown, Grace was discharged from duty and sent to a sanatorium in Brighton. She told the psychologist everything; the experience of her religious and oppressive parents, her terrible love affair with Dick Devine, her failure to Ronald, the stories that kept coming from the concentration camps about so many different people the Nazis had declared subhuman, the wounded boys from both wars whom she could no longer forget.

There was a chapel at the sanatorium. Grace tried to ignore it.

John Humphrey came to visit her, trying to comfort her. She tried to smile.

Margery Dimble sent her a Christmas card with a beautiful portrait of the infant Jesus laughing up at Mary. She kept it.

There were very few women in the sanatorium, most worse off than herself. Grace found herself wandering the gardens restlessly, finally asking if she could care for one of the vegetable beds. Permission was granted, and she found herself in long talks with the gardener.

Her psychologist smiled at her one day. "You've really helped Smitty, did you know?"

"Me?"

"Mm. He told me you'd really set his head straight about his wife meaning no harm, and he's trying to help her more."

Grace shrugged. "It's human nature to get angry at those closest to us. Sometimes they even deserve it," she added, a little bitterly.

"Like your parents, and Dick."

She nodded. "Or God."

He grinned wryly. "God's pretty safe to be angry at, these days... no bolts of lightning at the unbelievers." She tried to smile. "But you're not an unbeliever, are you?"

"I want to be."

He sighed. "That's beyond my ability. Have you met Canon Dunn?"

"He's been very nice to me. I'm afraid I've not been very nice back. You know it's hard for me to trust a clergyman."

"Well. I think you can trust him to neither chide you nor convert you; he wouldn't be here, on my watch, if he were that type. I prescribe a walk in the garden with Canon Dunn."

\--

Grace found, to her relief, that her psychologist had shared his notes with Canon Dunn, and there was no need to relate what had gone before, only her feelings now. They took more than one walk, as she realised that she had found not a counselor, but a friend.

He encouraged her to rebuild old friendships, and she wrote to Humphrey and Margery, who visited as their busy schedules and trains allowed. Margery sent her many cards.

At Canon Dunn's suggestion, she returned to the study of psychology herself, acknowledging that it had helped her, and that she could help others. She found herself chatting in the garden with other injured souls, and finding herself as refreshed as they.

"You're done here, you know," her psychologist said one day.

She knew.

"I don't want to go," she said, wistfully. "This has become home."

"You have other homes. You can go back to Edgestow. I know Mrs. Dimble has offered."

She shook her head. "No."

In the end, it was Humphrey who provided the solution. He had a client, Mr. Fisher-King, who needed a full-time medical attendant. And he lived just a couple of towns away from Edgestow. It turned out that Margery and Cecil knew him as well.

"He used to be called Elwin Ransom," Humphrey told her, "but he had a distant relative who died and insisted in her will that he take the name."

"And he's permanently wounded? Rather an interesting coincidence."

"I don't think anything in Ransom's life is exactly random." Humphrey looked out the window, eyebrows furrowed. "You'll see when you meet him."

"And what will I see?"

Humphrey grinned at her. "Now that would be telling."

**Author's Note:**

> I love Wikipedia, my alpha reader Cereta, my Methodist educator friend Kayre, and my Britpicker Odessie. And also my roommate Rubynye for getting me into this in the first place. :)


End file.
